An author recently asked me this question: I now have an accepted and confirmed publishing deal based on my detailed proposal from a leading academic publisher. However, it has been suggested to me that I not take the academic deal and push to find a trade publisher with a much larger audience. Those who have…
Newsletter 51. A tribute to the grueling journey of this year’s graduation class. Plus, ableist ChatGPT, foot traffic to bookstores improves, plus three people to follow and three books to read. Spare a thought for the college Class of 2024 About 4 million people will complete a college degree this year. This is a class…
Newsletter 49. Why STEM education is about mind exercise, not job training. Plus, why AI is fair turnabout for journalists, ChatGPT is a bullshitter, and the Stanford Internet Observatory stops tracking the spread of lies. Plus, three people to follow and three books to read. Training thinkers For more than a decade, people have been…
I’m happy we had the time to sit down and talk. What’s on your mind? I’m in college now and I want to be a writer. Wow, that’s great. What kind of writer? Well, I like writing both fiction and nonfiction, and I want to make a living writing books. Awesome. I’ll be honest, it’s…
Can clear communication get truant students to come back to class? According to the results of a recent experiment, a clearly written letter was 40% more effective than the school district’s usual gobbledegook communication. The truancy experiment To succeed, students generally need to attend classes. Legally, a school district must inform parents of truant students…
Harvard’s president Claudine Gay has now changed some passages in work she wrote to address charges of plagiarism. Harvard’s investigation concluded, “the Fellows reviewed the results, which revealed a few instances of inadequate citation. While the analysis found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two…
The New York Times has jumped on the “AI will take our jobs” bandwagon, in an article titled “A.I. Is Coming for Mathematics, Too.” As the author Siobhan Roberts states, “For thousands of years, mathematicians have adapted to the latest advances in logic and reasoning. Are they ready for artificial intelligence?” The analysis in the…
I homeschooled my children. More accurately, my wife and I homeschooled them; I taught some writing and some high-school level math, and she did most of the rest. Teaching in school now all too often is some teacher delivering rote assignments to students who do them by rote. I worry that, as bad as that…
The objective of teaching students to write is not to ensure they create content that can be graded. It is to get them to engage with language and storytelling. This is not a new story. Students learn arithmetic even though there are calculators and spreadsheets. They learn spelling even though there are spelling checkers. And…